Product

Introducing Twitter Lite

Every day, millions of people around the world use Twitter to see what’s happening right now. However, there are several barriers to using Twitter, including slow mobile networks, expensive data plans, or lack of storage on mobile devices. While smartphone adoption grew to 3.8 billion connections by the end of 2016, 45% of mobile connections are still on slower 2G networks, according to GSMA.

Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device. We also optimized it for speed, with up to 30% faster launch times as well as quicker navigation throughout Twitter. Twitter Lite provides the key features of Twitter—your timeline, Tweets, Direct Messages, trends, profiles, media uploads, notifications, and more. With Twitter Lite, we are making Twitter more accessible to millions of people—all you need is a smartphone or tablet with a browser.

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In addition, we have added a data saver mode, which further reduces the amount of mobile data used. In this mode, you will see a preview of images and videos before choosing which ones to fully load. This can reduce your data usage by up to 70%, making it more affordable for you to use Twitter in areas where mobile data is expensive.

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Twitter Lite has additional features in Google Chrome and other modern browsers on Android devices. You can now receive a wide range of push notifications, so you’ll be alerted to what’s happening on Twitter throughout the day. Twitter Lite also offers offline support, so you will not be interrupted while using Twitter if you temporarily lose your connection. You can also add Twitter Lite to your device’s home screen, so you can launch Twitter quickly with just one tap.

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Starting today, Twitter Lite is available globally by visiting mobile.twitter.com on your smartphone or tablet. You can find more information about Twitter Lite at lite.twitter.com. A more in-depth look at how we built Twitter Lite can be found here.

Twitter Lite is a great way for many people in emerging markets across Asia Pacific, Latin America and Africa to experience Twitter for the first time on their mobile devices. Today in India, we have partnered with Vodafone, one of the country’s largest telecom operators with over 200 million subscribers, to promote Twitter Lite to their customers as a way to get live sports updates on Indian Premier League matches, teams, and players as the cricket season kicks off. More details about Twitter’s partnership with Vodafone in India can be found here.

We are working hard to bring more exciting updates to Twitter Lite for people worldwide and to develop more partnerships in emerging markets to make it useful. No matter where you are in the world, we want to make Twitter the best way for you to get real-time updates on news, sports, entertainment, politics, and other topics that matter most to you.